Push for better pay in the private sector
By Medicine Hat News Opinon on October 2, 2019.
You perceive your neighbour’s life to be better than yours. Maybe their house is bigger. Maybe you’re more attracted to their spouse than your own. Maybe their car is faster. For whatever reason, they have it better than you and it seems unfair.
You could direct your attention to bettering whatever aspects of your life need improvement, but instead you focus your time on finding ways to make that neighbour’s life more like yours.
“Their home should be smaller. Their spouse should be less attractive. That car is too fast.”
If you succeed, the even-keel result is seemingly fair and just, but the reality is your life isn’t better and theirs is worse. No one wins.
Yet this is the exact mindset people have when referencing the private sector versus that annoyingly well-off public one. For the past two days I have been looking at the MacKinnon Report’s three-pronged approach to public sector savings. The UCP-commissioned report suggests the government accomplish this through employee attrition, shifting services from public to private and salary restraint.
The question I ask is, are you willing to judge the path Alberta takes? Is a balanced budget all that matters, or does the road taken make a difference?
After discussing attrition and debating private versus public, today we’ll look at salary restraint.
On the surface, this is the toughest to argue against. I understand why Albertans salivate at the idea of public employees making less money. I mean, the MacKinnon Report was pretty clear, right?
Alberta spends more per person on health care and education than other places, and that could be brought more in line if we just stop paying employees so much. But what no one seems to be addressing is why Alberta spent more money than other places. Long before the province-hating NDP arrived, we were spending more money than, say, B.C. on things like education and health care.
We spent more money because we had more money. But as far as public employee salaries go, it wasn’t B.C. or Saskatchewan we were comparing against – it was Alberta’s own economy.
Thanks to the volatile oil and gas industry, Alberta for a long time gave off the impression of having an extremely rich private sector. Things like “average” wage helped public sector unions negotiate stronger contracts for themselves. Alberta was the richest province so it made sense to spend more money.
Now that the private sector seems in trouble, everyone’s natural reaction is to rein in the public sector. But, like the opening analogy shows, making sure both sectors suffer equally is no plan to a better future for either. Instead of trying to regress our public sector, shouldn’t we be looking for progress in the private one? And, unlike Premier Jason Kenney, I don’t mean increased investment through corporate tax cuts and eliminating regulations, which Albertans will undoubtedly pay for. I mean addressing the stagnant wages and weak unions in a private sector that only exists to make money and will never choose a human’s well being over its own.
While oil and gas drove up the province’s “average” wage and subsidized its revenue, most in the private sector became so overcompensated that they became ridiculously underpaid. As in, if cost of living is cheap, I don’t need to pay you as much.
So while our “average” wage helped the public sector get theirs, most of the private sector got screwed – but not by the government or a nurses’ union. People got screwed by a private sector that exists to suck as much money out of the economy as humanly possible.
Why do you think Medicine Hat has the most low-wage earners in the province? Could it be that the “Medicine Hat Advantage” only exists for people who already had or made good money, and that for everyone else it simply meant you got paid less than you would for the same job in Lethbridge?
If utilities are cheap but your wage is proportionately cheap, what difference does it make to you?
Public employees have stronger unions and a boss they can hold accountable. The Conservative governments that raised wages so high had to listen in negotiations. They had to focus on the employee’s needs, and even their demands.
The private sector in Alberta doesn’t have the same responsibility to people. Its only responsibility is collecting money, so it will always give its employees the least amount possible. What if, instead of listening to crony capitalists tell you we have to cripple the public sector to match the suffering of the private one, we create more power for regular people to demand the private sector treat Albertans as if they’re more than a means to own all the cash?
Part three of a four-part series
Part one — Should ‘efficiency of service’ always be the top priority?
Part two — Privatization tends to drive prices up
Part four — They want to cut your social safety net
(Scott Schmidt is the layout editor at the Medicine Hat News. You can contact him by email at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com)
